David Condon Finds

Cheap imported goods have quietly changed how people see handmade products. Many shoppers today are used to mass-produced items that cost very little, and that can make the price of handmade craft seem shocking at first glance. I see this reaction regularly when I sell my woodturning at craft fairs. One moment people admire the piece in their hands, the next moment the price changes the conversation entirely. If you have ever stopped at a craft table, picked something up, admired it, and then quietly put it back when you heard the price, this post is partly about that moment. I don’t say that to criticise anyone. I understand why it happens. But I also think years of cheap imported goods have changed the way many of us judge handmade work. My woodturning table at a craft fair in Manor West, Tralee in 2018 with handmade bowls, pens and small turned gifts on display. A quick note: This post was originally published on my main website, David Condon Woodcraft, but I have moved it here bec...

I launched my first website David Condon Woodcraft back in 2017 . At the time I knew my craft fairly well, but I knew very little about websites, SEO, or how Google actually finds and ranks content. Like many small business owners, I jumped straight in and learned everything the hard way. Over the years I made plenty of mistakes. Some were small, others probably slowed the growth of my business by years. The good news is that a website doesn’t have to be perfect to work. Mine eventually started generating sales and enquiries, but looking back there are several things I would do differently if I had the chance to start again. Here are the biggest lessons. I Would Still Choose Wix The first thing worth saying is that I would still choose Wix . Before settling on it, I tried several different website builders in the very beginning and quickly realised that many of them were far more complicated than I wanted to deal with. Wix, by contrast, was simple drag-and-drop design. For som...

Starting a new blog is exciting in a very particular way. You’ve written your first proper posts, and hit publish with the quiet hope that something will happen fairly quickly. Your heart and soul is poured out in those first few lines, and your words feel as honest as you can make them. Those first few posts usually feel great too. They’re often better written than you expect, more thoughtful, more structured. You add internal links where they make sense, you avoid fluff, and you genuinely feel like you’ve put something useful out into the world. I have already written a broader post about my blogging journey from complete beginner to a slightly more experienced writer . This post is a little different. It is more of a one-year check-in: what has improved, what still feels slow, what I have learned, and what it is really like trying to keep a small blog moving when Google has not fully decided what to do with it yet.

I use Amazon affiliate links on some of my blog posts. Not on everything, and not just for the sake of it, but where a product fits naturally into a post and may be useful to someone reading it. Over time, Amazon affiliate reports used to give me one very useful piece of information. They showed me what products had actually been bought. That might sound like a small thing, but for a small blogger, it was extremely useful. It helped me understand what real people were buying after clicking through from one of my links. Not who they were. Not where they lived. Not their name, email address, full basket, or private details. Just the product. And losing that kind of information makes Amazon affiliate reports far less useful than they used to be. What Amazon Affiliate Reports Used to Show In the past, if someone clicked one of my Amazon affiliate links and later bought something, the report could show the product that was bought. That did not always mean they bought the product I recommend...

When I first started blogging properly, I had no idea where it would lead. At the beginning, the goal was simple enough. I wanted to help my main website gain a bit more visibility, answer useful customer questions, and maybe give Google a clearer idea of what my business was about. What I did not expect was how addictive the whole process would become. Once you start watching Google Search Console, checking impressions, average position, clicks, indexed pages, and little movements in the right direction, it is very easy to get pulled in. A small improvement can feel like a breakthrough. A dip can feel like a disaster. A new post can feel like the thing that might finally push the site forward. And for a while, that excitement kept me going. Reaching the 10 Point Average Phase One of the big moments for me was seeing the blog move towards the 10 point average position range in Google Search Console. That might not sound very exciting to someone outside the world of blogging, but ...